An organization linked to Egypt's intelligence service withdrew $10 million in cash five days before Donald Trump became president in January 2017, and special counsel Robert Mueller later investigated whether that money had found its way to him before then-attorney general Bill Barr made what one official called a "jaw dropping" decision to shut down the probe.
The CIA briefed officials at the Department of Justice in early 2017 that Egyptian president Abdel Fatah El-Sisi may have sought to send money to Trump, based on claims by a reliable confidential informant, and they sent the case to Mueller, who had been appointed in May to investigate links between the then-president's campaign and Russia, reported the Washington Post.
The team investigating the Egypt case was dubbed Team 10, as in $10 million, and they noticed that on Sept. 19, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, Trump had a closed-door meeting with Sisi, who had seized power three years earlier in a military coup, at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, and afterward his campaign said he told the foreign leader the U.S. would be a "loyal friend" if he was elected president.
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The U.S. had been holding Sisi at arm's length since the coup, and investigators found it meaningful that Trump had so quickly embraced him, and once he was president he invited the Egyptian leader to be one of his first guests at the White House and met with him again on his first trip abroad.
Team 10 was investigating whether the money moved from Cairo to Trump, which would have violated U.S. election law, and they suspected those funds may have factored into Trump's decision inject $10 million of his own money into his campaign in the final days before the 2016 election.
However, top Justice Department officials blocked prosecutors and FBI agents from obtaining crucial bank records, according to people familiar with the case as well as documents and contemporaneous notes of the investigation, and Trump's then-attorney general dealt the case a fatal blow by raising doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to continue the probe.
Barr directed the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie Liu, to personally examine the classified intelligence to determine whether further investigation was warranted, and he later instructed FBI director Christopher Wray to impose “adult supervision” on FBI agents Barr described as “hell-bent” on obtaining Trump's records, according to sources familiar with the exchange.
The prosecutor Barr appointed to take over the office from Liu, who had at first pursued the probe aggressively, closed the investigation in June 2020, citing citing “a lack of sufficient evidence to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt" – which conflicted with months of internal disagreements about the case.
“Every American should be concerned about how this case ended,” said one of the sources familiar with that internal disagreement. “The Justice Department is supposed to follow evidence wherever it leads — it does so all the time to determine if a crime occurred or not."